Exactly two years after his abrupt resignation from the board of Shaw Stockbroking, veteran broker
Harold Shapiro
is back in business.

Fresh from a holiday taking snaps of wild animals in Botswana – including close-up shots of lions eating elephants – the 67-year-old has opened his own consultancy to help companies with investor relations and raising capital.

One type of business he is unlikely to promote will be those from his former industry.

“I would not at this point put equity into a stockbroking firm," he says. “The industry has a lot of issues ahead of it. I am very happy to be on the outside."

Shapiro is a member of the Australian Stockbroking Hall of Fame and is famous for having led the revolt by stockbrokers against the ASX’s low-ball offer to its owners when it demutualised in the mid-1990s; the exchange offered each broker $25,000 but eventually caved in to give them instead 166,000 ASX shares, a stake now worth $4.8 million.

He helped set up Shaw in 1993 and stood down from its board two years ago after long-running tensions over whether the firm should have tried harder to find a buyer during a strategic review. At the time, he owned 27 per cent of the business and it took another five months to structure a deal to pay him out. Since then the firm has sunk into the red, posting a $1.2 million loss for 2012. Shapiro refused to discuss his old broker.

But he painted a downbeat vision of stockbroking’s future, saying the lack of corporate activity and nervousness among investors is unlikely to change to any great extent in 2013.

“One of the issues throughout participants," he says of brokers that are members of the ASX, “is there’s an ageing of the adviser base and there are not as many stockbrokers coming in."

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He adds that the trend is for financial service providers to offer a range of services, including options on foreign markets, forex transactions and CFDs, because day-to-day trading “by punters is taking place through those providers".

Traditional stockbrokers are still dealing mostly with just one product: equities. They will have to widen their products to capture investors, and that’s unlikely to happen with older brokers, he says. “There will have to be changes in the industry."

South African-born Shapiro describes himself as semi-retired and says he’s been keeping active visiting peers, attending conferences and getting his affairs in order.

“I’ve had extra time to go to the gym and I’ve gotten used to not having the headache of running a big broker house. I find that the days pass very quickly," he says.

He has also been working with the Stockbrokers Association on regulatory reforms, including the leviathan Future of Financial Advice changes. At Shaw, he vigorously campaigned for a crackdown on the booming indirect broking industry – firms that often look like full-service broking ones but in reality use other larger companies to run their entire back offices.

Such firms avoid direct application of market integrity rules and regulatory oversight, and Shapiro has frequently called on the Australian Stock Exchange and Australian Securities and Investments Commission to stop them marketing as “brokers", saying it causes confusion.

Last week, stockbrokers scored a victory over their indirect broker rivals: the government has given them a carve-out from the looming ban against companies sharing the brokerage earned on share trades with staff. Indirect brokers will be caught by the ban and will have to shift to cumbersome fee-for-service systems.

But Shapiro thinks the carve-out is “stupid" and says the government should be putting indirect brokers onto the same standards as real brokers, and make them subject to market integrity rules, rather than giving real brokers special treatment.

“You’ve got six times as many indirect brokers today as ordinary brokers; you cannot reverse that trend," he says.

“If you want to prevent major catastrophes in the future, you have to bring them into the tent and make them subject to market integrity rules. Don’t focus on the [ASX] participants because they are dwindling and you’re creating bigger problems down the line."

When Shapiro helped found Shaw Stockbroking in 1993, markets were just starting what would be a 15-year bull run.

While his stake in the firm was hit by the downturn – he only received about $3 million for his 27 per cent stake, well below what it was worth in net tangible assets – he agrees the entire period coincided with a golden era for retail brokers. And potentially the last.

“My exit happens to be timely in that I would not want to go back into the same industry that I knew for 40 years."